Caution with Ketones

Chris Kelly from NourishBalanceThrive recently interviewed me for his podcast.

www.nourishbalancethrive.com

Chris’ own most recent experiment with ketones fascinated me so I wanted to chat with him on if this kind of experiment can be reproduced in the general populace. My biggest point is that we should exercise caution before regularly simultaneously raising blood glucose and ketones.

We also talk about why metabolic flexibility, not ketosis, should be the goal for most endurance athletes

The two most glaring problems had to do with impaired fat use and impaired carb use.

From Nelson, Michael T., George R. Biltz, and Donald R. Dengel. “Repeatability of Respiratory Exchange Ratio Time Series Analysis.” The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research 29.9 (2015): 2550-2558.

“Goedecke et al. (12) showed a very large interindividual variability in resting RER from 0.72 up to 0.93 that even persisted during exercise of increasing intensity. This corresponded to a relative rate of fat oxidation that ranged from 23 to 93%. This large interindividual variability in RER from 0.83 to 0.95 was also demonstrated by Helge et al. (16) during low-intensity steady-state exercise. This was quite similar to what we observed with a range of RER from 0.82 to 0.97.” (Nelson, MT, et al. 2015).

Problems with impaired carb use:

Research has shown that those are on a very low carb diet for prolonged periods of time demonstrate a reduced ability to fully use them during exercise (Burke, LM, et al.; Stellingwerf T. et al).